In the early 1940s, as the boys were heading off to war, the screwball comedy – that quintessential expression of American hope during the Depression – was packing its bags as well. It didn’t take its leave, though; not yet. Instead it caught the 5:20 at Penn Station and headed out to the hinterlands.

William Powell and Myrna Loy, who a few years before had starred together in “Libeled Lady” (not to mention a string of “Thin Man” movies through the 1930s) took their act to small-town Pennsylvania for “I Love You Again,” the ultimate comedy of remarriage, in which Powell played a con man woken from a decade of amnesia to discover he had become a family man – and not a very good one. Billy Wilder sent fast-talking dame Ginger Rogers on a similar trip, in “The Major and the Minor.” Her New York working girl, who disguises herself as a child to get free train fare back to Iowa, gets waylaid – where else? – at an Army base.

Preston Sturges, the last great director of screwballs, took a little longer to follow the exodus. But when he did, the result was a miracle – “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.” He followed it up with a companion film, “Hail the Conquering Hero,” both starring the same actor, stammering genius (he claimed to have i-i-i-invented the screen stutter) Eddie Bracken.

These two films, highlights of the weekend series at the American Museum of the Moving Image, which begins tomorrow (playing January 2 and 1 respectively), are among the truest, funniest, most touching ever made about American life. The flower of Sturges’s career, and indeed an entire generation of filmmakers, they are sophisticated movies without a sophisticate in them. They mark the end of Sturges’s brief, unparalleled period of achievement, which as it happened almost precisely coincided with World War II.

Sturges, the first man ever to claim the title “writer-director,” was a deviser of perfect plots,as well as a composer of perfect dialogue. “Oh look, Father, he does card tricks!” exclaims con woman Barbara Stanwyck in his first masterpiece, “The Lady Eve” (December 26 & January 1),as she and the equally shady paterfamilias set out to take Henry Fonda’s Hopsie at bridge. His other true screwball, “Palm Beach Story” (December 26), begins with a rush to the altar and the famous intertitle: “And they lived happier ever after … or did they?” It ends with a triple wedding.

Both these films take as their setting the playgrounds of the idle rich. From Sturges’s splendid script for “Easy Living” on down, the rich are made to seem anything but glamorous. But neither are they vilified: They are merely presented as deserving of sympathy and a happy ending, just as the small-town rubes of his later films would be.

Perhaps this is because, quite often, Sturges’s rich characters were rubes as well. To the screwball formula he added a character as bewildered by the fast-talking operators around him as the audience was – this, along with the title “O, Brother Where Art Thou,” was one of his legacies to the Coen brothers. Rudy Vallee in “The Palm Beach Story” is so wide-eyed he’s willing to believe Joel McRea isn’t Claudette Colbert’s husband but someone named “Captain McGlew.” Henry Fonda in “The Lady Eve” is so dumb he falls in love with the same girl twice, and believes it when he’s told she isn’t the same girl. “Go to the window and look like you don’t know a thing,” he’s told, conspiratorially, at one point; it’s only too easy to oblige.

The punchline of this setup, of course, is that it turns out the sophisticates aren’t as smart as they think they are, nor the rubes quite as dumb as at first they seemed.

The lesson was made explicit in “Sullivan’s Travels” (December 18 & 19). Made the same year, 1941, as “Palm Beach Story,” it seems clearly to mark the moment when Sturges himself started thinking about sending his stock company out to the territories. McRea plays the director of “Ants in Your Pants 1940,” who, dissatisfied with light comedy, sets out to travel the country to gather material for a serious drama. In a famous scene in which he watches a slapstick routine brighten the lives of a prison chain gang, he sees the error of his ways and the vital role of laughter in an often cruel world.

“Morgan’s Creek” (January 2) and “Hail the Conquering Hero” (January 1), made while many of America’s young men were giving their lives overseas, and many women found themselves widows or suddenly childless back at home, exemplify this lesson. But they are the furthest thing from didactic. They have the same speed and sudden coincidences as the previous movies, but none of the surface polish. Everything seems to take place in a pleasant daze.

In both films Bracken plays young men who are 4-F, and so stay home from war. This loss of manhood is essential to his clumsy, vacillating characters, and in both cases he has to earn it back – even though Sturges puts every possible obstacle (literally) in his path.

In “Hail the Conquering Hero,” Bracken’s Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith is adopted by a crew of returning soldiers, who convince his hometown and family he’s a war hero. Norval Jones in “Morgan’s Creek” has a crush on Betty Hutton’s Trudy, but finds himself with an unexpected set of responsibilities when she discovers she’s been impregnated by a soldier headed off to war (Sturges’s elegant waltz around the censors, given this controversial subject matter, merely adds to this achievement).

The relentless plotting of Sturges in these films comes to seem very difficult to separate from the forces of fate. The director contrives every coincidence possible, pushes his characters around as if he were God – but we should all believe in a God as benevolent and creative as this. In the end, the message of his movies seems to be that, while maturity can be earned, innocence can’t. It’s a gift.

So celebrate Christmas this year with a virgin birth – or five.

Until January 2 (3601 35th Avenue, at 36th Street, Astoria, 718-784-4520.